Deus Ex Crystal Therapy

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Develop magazine have reported that Deus Ex 3 will be made in the Tomb Raider engine.

Talking to Eidos Montreal’s new head honcho, Stéphane D’Astous, they learned the new team has plans to use Crystal Dynamics’ engine, which they intend to develop further. He explains,

“In former positions where I worked technology was always a grey zone, a question mark. I’m relieved that here at Eidos we have two great internal engines – one from IO Interactive and one from Crystal. We chose the Crystal engine because we plan to help develop this engine more and then share it back with the rest of the company, the other Eidos studios.”

So we should probably add a remark about JC Denton leaping from cliff-face to tree branch, shooting a tiger, then swimming in insane circles before drowning under a rock. But it seems like good news to us. While for the sake of Tomb Raider, the engine is forced into a distinctly tile-based design, breaking free of that will hopefully let it shine as strongly as it did in the wonderful waterfall scene in Tomb Raider: Legend. It’s capable of looking extremely beautiful.

given that this game is close to 2 years away from being released, will the tomb raider engine still hold up graphically, given that we have crysis out today.
I’d love to see development costs come down, but just how expensive is it to licence something like the crytek2 engine?

UE 3 costs $500,000 pounds at the very basic level, you don’t get full sorce, since people sign an NDA on this stuff i don’t know hw much the full sourceversion of UE 3 is but i’ve heard 2 million bandied around, thats a lot of money by anyones standards and Deus Ex was never about hte graphics, thats half of where DX2 went wrong.

UE3: The bottom level offer includes giving up a fraction of the profits on the game too, yeah? It used to, at least.

And, as I’m sure a dev will chip in and confirm, if you buy an engine, you’re still going to have to do a mass of work on it anyway. It’s not like a games construction kit.

They’ve got a solid engine which works and they can do a lot of work with (Which they’d have had to do with any game anyway). It could be a lot worse.

(I suspect stepping back from the cutting edge of games graphics may be a good idea. Chasing that with DX2 with its lighting was one of the things which lead to the smaller areas. A DX3 team have enough things to worry about apart from being the prettiest game on the market)

You can either see that as a risky decision or a brave one. The latter most definitely for me.

So many games can suffer from developers concentrating on pushing the graphical envelope to the detriment of the rest of the game. It’ll still look lovely, and hopefully they’ll pour more resources into the gameplay, characters, story and bug testing.